The great Banian tree in the Royal Botanical Garden, Calcutta

This banyan tree is the largest in the world of its type. An 1895 guide to the Royal Botanical Garden in Calcutta mentions the 51-foot (15.5 meters) girth of the main trunk, a circumference where the branches spread widest of 976 feet (297 meters), and the existence of 378 aerial roots. The great banyan was, and continues to be, the principal attraction of the garden. This photograph by the eminent Indian photographer Lala Deen Dayal captures the tree's imposing spread, and emphasizes its picturesque qualities through the symmetry resulting from the tree's reflection in the lake.

Calcutta's Royal Botanical Garden, the oldest in India and one of the largest scientific establishments of the British Empire, was founded in 1786. Imperial botanical gardens were the nineteenth-century counterparts of modern research laboratories, focusing on such wide-ranging topics as medical research and the search for new and profitable plantation crops. The resulting plant transfers succeeded in altering patterns of world trade and production. Such institutions thus contributed to shifts in imperial power by facilitating the redistribution of capital, natural resources, and labor.